Today's marketplace is hypercompetitive. Brands compete for attention, hoping they can turn that attention into a loyal customer. But too many companies are not able to build a long-term relationship that results in a loyal customer because the customer had a poor experience.
To remain competitive, brands need to create compelling integrated customer experiences that continue to evolve and reduce the friction between company and customer over the lifetime of the relationship.
This IDC Vendor Spotlight discusses the current challenge that organizations face in providing a differentiating customer support experience and the potential that technology offers as a lever to improve the customer support experience.

Customers are more technically savvy than everand have come to prefer the DIY approach to solving their issues and answering their own questions. Years of research by ICMI has confirmed that customers prefer to resolve issues themselves and within their channels of choice. Furthermore, customers onlyseek direct interactions when they unsuccessfully exhaust their self-service options. This is backed up by data from American Express, which found that 48% of consumers prefer to speak with a customer service rep when dealing with complex issues, but only16% prefer the same contact for simple issues. The goal
of this paper is simple: We want to help you build an all-in-one knowledge base, community, and customer portal. All of which can be accomplished with a help center like Zendesk Guide.

While the shift from disk to digital offers tremendous potential opportunities, it also presents a host
of new challenges for gaming companies. As the online channel grows increasingly complex and the pace
of innovation accelerates, many companies struggle to keep up. Not only are there websites and storefronts
to manage, but also real-time gaming servers, large software downloads, and live-streamed competitions and
events. Games are transforming from fixed, boxed products to dynamic, ongoing services – with frequently
updated content, in-game micro-transactions, virtual goods and social interactions. Mobile adds another
dimension to the trend, as consumers increasingly look to play on smart phones and tablets – or on multiple
screens across devices.
To successfully navigate this complex and changing landscape, gaming companies need an agile,
high- performance infrastructure that allows them to turn the Internet into a reliable and effective
online distribution channel. This requires f

Leading companies and technology providers are rethinking the fundamental model of analytics, and the contours of a new paradigm are emerging. The new generation of analytics goes beyond Big Data (information that is too large and complex to manipulate without robust software), and the traditional narrow approach of analytics which was restricted to analysing customer and financial data collected from their interactions on social media. Today companies are embracing the social revolution, using real-time technologies to unlock deep insights about customers and others and enable better-informed decisions and richer collaboration in real-time.

Customers are more technically savvy than ever and have come to prefer the DIY approach to solving their issues and answering their own questions. Years of research by ICMI has confirmed that customers prefer to resolve issues themselves and within their channels of choice. Furthermore, customers only seek direct interactions when they unsuccessfully exhaust their self-service options. This is backed up by data from American Express, which found that 48% of consumers prefer to speak with a customer service rep when dealing with complex issues, but only 16% prefer the same contact for simple issues. The goal of this paper is simple: We want to help you build an all-in-one knowledge base, community, and customer portal. All of which can be accomplished with a help center like Zendesk Guide.

"Differentiate your organization through customer engagement
Improving customer experiences has replaced operational efficiency gains as the top objective in customer care executives’ agendas. This Aberdeen report details how “best-in-class” firms are achieving greater customer retention and annual growth as a result. Discover more in the report now >"

Consider the many ways that a customer encounters your brand – organic results on a search engine, display media campaigns, social media links, re-targeting on external sites, etc. One thing is certain – consumer journeys are far from linear. They can occur across multiple platforms, devices and browsers. The problem is that organizations are often constrained to channel-limiting decisions regarding their media investment allocations.
Marketing attribution helps you analyze the impact and business value of company-generated marketing interactions to help make the best marketing investment decisions. The challenge is to interpret the massive volumes of customer data that continues to expand day by day.

The digital marketplace presents new challenges for marketers, yet provides the perfect canvas for creating personalized, relevant communications and developing deep relationships with customers based on ongoing interactions.
This paper explores what customer “moments of truth” mean, and how understanding those moments of truth along the customer journey enables marketers to deliver the personalized, real-time responses that customers crave. You’ll also learn best practices on how customer experience optimization and digital marketing optimization can help marketers capitalize on moments of truth.

"Differentiate your organization through customer engagement Improving customer experiences has replaced operational efficiency gains as the top objective in customer care executives’ agendas. This Aberdeen report details how “best-in-class” firms are achieving greater customer retention and annual growth as a result. Discover more in the report now >"

Data is the fuel of all marketing activities. Customers and prospective buyers are savvy, empowered, and carry high expectations for personalization across all interactions. Without the right data—at the right time—as well as the most effective strategies in place to manage our data sources, our communications and offers are dead on arrival. A one-size-fits-all approach to marketing is not a sound tactic—it’s a marketing fruitcake that no one wants to receive. It’s time to get down with data to delight your audience and provide them with the personal experiences they deserve. Read the marketing essentials guide now.

30 seconds or less. The average length of time that consumers spend reading or listening to online marketing communications . Marketers today are now equipped with the strategies and technologies to better capture consumer attention. To do this, they need to orchestrate individualized customer experiences across the digital channels. Read on for a statistical profile of today’s distracted consumer, followed by actionable tips for effectively communicating and converting this new type of consumer.

Business buyers are more demanding than ever. They expect organizations to meet their precise needs through the life-cycle of interactions with B2B brands. This means providing today’s business buyers with consumer like-experiences that allow them to do their job better and easier, and making the complex simple. Download this white paper from Aberdeen Group to learn the five best practices to get B2B e-commerce right and how to achieve best-in-class performance in customer retention, revenue growth, and operational efficiency.

Customer insights professionals face the challenging task of delivering contextually relevant experiences across the customer life cycle. They need to work with their business technology counterparts to integrate enterprise marketing technologies that manage customer data, provide real-time analytics and insights, and automate cross-channel interactions. Here is where Real-Time Interaction Management (RTIM) is critical, according to The Forrester Wave™: Real-Time Interaction Management, Q3 2015 report, which identified the 11 most significant technology providers in this space across 35 criteria. Forrester defines RTIM as “Enterprise marketing technology that delivers contextually relevant experiences, value, and utility at the appropriate moment in the customer life cycle via preferred customer touchpoints,” and identifies Pegasystems as one a leader in this very diversified pack.
Download this Forrester Wave report to

Banks are at an inflection point. According to a recent research by Viacom, 1 in every 3 U.S. consumers are open to switching banks in the next 90 days. Financial services companies need to break through the competition to gain customer trust and loyalty. Building a 360° view of the customer can help banks grow customer retention and loyalty, upsell high margin products and provide compelling interactions. However, this is no easy task as complexity increases when retail banks engage their customers across multiple channels and financial products.
Gaining visibility into every customer interaction, across your business silos, and with every engagement channel is critical to making the right decisions to deliver amazing customer experiences. This white paper examines the challenges Financial Services Institutions (FSIs) face when building a 360° view of the customer to transform their customer experience and how to overcome them.

Download our new white paper, Retail Stores of the Future, to learn how you can bring the best of online shopping to brick-and-mortar stores. You’ll see how new digital marketing technologies and strategies can be applied to in-store interactions—so you can create immersive experiences everywhere your customers go.
Read the white paper now to discover:
• How retailers are blending innovative technologies with traditional shopping
• Four key approaches they’re using to build Stores of the Future
• The interactive tools they’re employing to enrich in-store experiences

Transforming IT to meet the emerging requirements of a rapidly advancing digital economy is a priority for most companies today. Market economies and quickly evolving digital interactions are driving new and increasing demands on IT infrastructure for organizations of all kinds – from small businesses to enterprises to public institutions. IT requirements to support a variety of digital use paradigms (personal devices, IoT, VMs, VDI) are changing quickly, and organizations need to respond in order to be competitive in this evolving digital world.
The latest generation of PowerEdge servers powered by Intel® Xeon® processors can deliver differentiated business agility over older-generation infrastructure. IDC asserted that updating servers can help businesses deploy applications up to 22 percent faster and improve application performance up to 29 percent over outdated infrastructure.
Intel Inside®. New Possibilities Outside.

Using IBM Watson’s cognitive capabilities, companies can quickly differentiate their customer service quality by being more pro active and responsive to customer needs. Simply put, chatbots and virtual agents are the future of customer interactions. Building apps from scratch that incorporate natural language processing, speech to text recognition, visual recognition, analytics, and artificial intelligence requires broad expertise in these disciplines, large staffs, and a huge financial commitment. Making use of IBM Watson cognitive services brings these capabilities in-house quickly and without the capital investment that would be needed to develop the technologies within an organization.

Gradient Boosting Machine (GBM) modeling is a powerful machine learning technique for advanced root cause analysis in manufacturing. It will uncover problems that would be missed by regression-based statistical modelling techniques and single tree methods, but can easily be used by analysts with no expertise in statistics and modelling to solve complex problems. It is an excellent choice for advanced equipment commonality analysis and will detect interactions between process factors (for example, machines, recipes, process dates) that are responsible for bad product. It can also be used to identify complex nonlinear relationships and interactions between product quality measurements (for example, yield, defects, field returns) and upstream measurements from the product, process, equipment, component, material, or environment.

Transforming IT to meet the emerging requirements of a rapidly advancing digital economy is a priority for most companies today. Market economies and quickly evolving digital interactions are driving new and increasing demands on IT infrastructure for organizations of all kinds – from small businesses to enterprises to public institutions. IT requirements to support a variety of digital use paradigms (personal devices, IoT, VMs, VDI) are changing quickly, and organizations need to respond in order to be competitive in this evolving digital world.

Customers have caught on that support interactions are getting better. When they reach out, they’ve come to expect an instant response that says “we’re here for you”. When they want information, it’s expected to be accurate, up-to-date, and easily accessible. Essentially, they come to expect efficiency during support interactions.
As a result, businesses are becoming more cognizant of their self- service offerings. Customers want to be left feeling empowered; it’s even better when they can do so on their own. Self-service saves time for agents, cuts down on organizational costs, and leaves the customer with a positive outlook of a brand.
This eBook delves into how AI can enhance your customer self-service offerings with automatically-generated knowledge bases, content cues for your service agents, and chatbots.

As companies increasingly look to provide a better experience for customers, offering support across multiple channels is becoming more popular than ever. According to the Aberdeen Group, companies doubled the number of channels they use to interact with customers between 2012 and 2017.
But there’s a difference between providing support on a few channels and delivering a truly integrated omnichannel solution. Using the Zendesk Benchmark, our crowd-sourced index of customer service interactions from 45,000 participating organizations across 140 countries, we examined why companies are going omnichannel and what sets the companies using Zendesk for omnichannel support apart from everyone else.

Taking full advantage of each customer interaction has become a strategic imperative. And customer-oriented companies in a wide range of industries must focus on developing a contact center that drives effective, consistent customer interactions and builds long-term customer loyalty. In this white paper, learn how leading organizations empower the contact center.

The company's ultimate goal was to enhance the interaction among its CRM applications and maximize the value of each incoming call to create more personalized and profitable interactions with customers.

The company's ultimate goal was to enhance the interaction among its CRM applications and maximize the value of each incoming call to create more personalized and profitable interactions with customers.